How I came to be in McLaine’s commune on the shore of Puerto de la Valencia is a story for another time, because today, of all days, is about tomorrow.
McLaine was busying himself with his fishing nets in the courtyard at the back of the pre-civil war building housing his community, his wives, Consuela and Pamela were arguing in a mixture of rapid-fire Spanish and Surrey English about the best way to gut hake, and the writers, me included, were sitting on the garden wall watching the TV we rented for the occasion. We’d positioned it there because no room in the house was big enough to hold more than two of us and one of those would have to be standing.
The TV was showing pictures of men in lumpy orange suits, with big helmets, floating half a million miles away in a Lagrange point imaginatively called L2. For the gazillionth time a talking head revealed this was where the gravity of the Earth and the Sun was in equilibrium with the centripetal force of the object orbiting in that position. In this case, the object was the mile-wide disk of the Plu mothership. We called it a mothership, rather than “Cruise liner” because the Americans love their cultural imperialism and Independence Day was the must watch movie of the moment. But it was really a holiday boat. The Plu were on vacation.
When they found Earth, they loved our Carbon Dioxide thickened air, because the Plu are photosynthesising plants. Sapient, motile, dextrous plants, but plants, nonetheless.
As Ambassador Prinki, the first of the Pru to make contact, put it, “Human CO2 is like crack cocaine to us. It has a flavour unique in the galaxy.”
It turned out the Pru breathed in CO2 and excreted oxygen, and carbon in the form of uncut diamonds, so the UN agreed to add the Earth to the Pru cruise-ship vacation roster, and in return, the Pru would bring our CO2 problem under control.
A few months after first contact, the cruise ship arrived, and tomorrow, the Pru will land in predetermined holiday camps around the globe and get their CO2 hit.
The tomorrow in question is New York EST, and the big clock in Time Square was ticking down to midnight, where protestors waved their banners and enthusiasts waved their various welcome signs, clothes, fancy dress, and anything else human ingenuity could define as a pan-galactic hello.
The cameras panned, the crowd fell silent, and the clock counted the last five seconds. Then they were there. Six plants with bulbous heads, flaring nostrils and jagged mouths. One of them stepped out of its travel pot and the crowd drew in a collective breath.
“Mans youze is ugly, but I lurves youse halitosis.” Then it shat a small pile of diamonds and sighed. And like that, the world was saved.
The crowd cheered. All except a small man with glasses, a bad haircut, and a spray gun containing Glycophosphate.
